Orphans of the Carnival Read online

  ALSO BY CAROL BIRCH

  Jamrach’s Menagerie

  Scapegallows

  The Naming of Eliza Quinn

  Turn Again Home

  Come Back, Paddy Riley

  Little Sister

  Songs of the West

  Life in the Palace

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Carol Birch

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Canongate Books Ltd., Edinburgh, in 2016.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Book design by Pei Loi Koay

  Cover design by Janet Hansen and Emily Mahon

  Cover illustration © Culver Pictures / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Birch, Carol, 1951– author.

  Title: Orphans of the carnival : a novel / by Carol Birch.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016002398 | ISBN 9780385541527 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385541534 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PR6052.I785 O77 2016 | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/​2016002398

  Ebook ISBN 9780385541534

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Carol Birch

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part 1: New World

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part 2: Old World

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part 3: Next World

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Martin

  This is where your lost toys went, the one the dog chewed, the one your mother threw out without asking when you left home, the ones you always wondered about.

  The island says: bring me your lost, your scorned, forgotten masses, bring me your maimed and ridiculous, bring me so much as a finger or a toe and I’ll take you in. Be you ever so grotesque or beauty sublime, it’s all the same to me. Everyone’s allowed in. Doesn’t matter who you were or what your story, doesn’t matter what state you’re in. You could’ve been smashed to smithereens, even your broken bits are welcome here.

  There’s nothing to the island. The Aztecs made it, many moons ago, long before the white men came. Trees, a stream, a few shacks, an old wooden landing stage. White butterflies hover over red flowers. From time to time a bird whistles, high and thin and querulous. A stream of water makes no sound. The dolls are legion. Strange fruit, they hang on every tree, and the trees crowd close. They hang like bunting on rusty wires running between the trees. They have covered all the walls, inside and out, filled every crack and cranny. The oldest has been here for more than fifty years; the youngest just arrived. The filth is proud.

  In the center of the island, at the center of a shrine in the middle of a moldy old shack with the word MUSEO over the door, a solemn black-haired, blue-eyed girl doll sits like Buddha under a framed color photograph of the hermit of the island, now dead. She is decked with beads and thin curled ribbons, some faded, some less so, surrounded by the gifts people bring to her, a strange trove of jewelry and holy pictures, sweets and candles, coins and finger puppets, small toys, a Rubik’s Cube, a troll, a worn set of Pokemon cards and a pink-haired white pony with large mascaraed eyes. This little girl will want for nothing. She is the little girl who drowned here so long ago, whoever she was. No one knows. It doesn’t matter. Little girls are loved and they drown, and there must be comfort for what can’t be cured. There must be dolls and shrines and remembrance in the company of a host of faces. Under the corrugated roof, dolls and their parts dangle from the rafters. From ceiling to dirt floor they hang on the flaking whitewashed walls. Spiders have woven furry gray curtains between them, veiling the faces of a few. There is a blunt-faced boy, made by the cobwebs into a strange smudged apparition. Flies hum. Silky eyes, whitened as if by cataracts, peer through trailing gray lianas. Baby dolls, sexy dolls, rag dolls, teen queens, ugly dolls, demon dolls, elvish dolls, dolls in the national costumes of various countries, naked and clothed, suspended, flying like angels. A strung-up baby in a blue romper suit hangs broken-necked, half-faced, dirt-encrusted. A gangster’s moll in a silk dress is losing her hectic red curls. A tiny face sleeps in the rafters, the underlip tucked in. The closed eyes have the authentic, ancient look of the newborn.

  The smell of long-established mold was thick and warm on the air.

  Outside, a slight breeze scarcely moved the long leaves and whiplike branches. You could walk ’round the island in a couple of minutes, but no one did. The endless diversity of decay slowed you down, variations on dollskin: poxed, blistered, burned black, bleached white, patterned elaborately, sometimes geometrically, by weather and the passage of time. Flies crawled on the dolls, gathering like mud in the creases of their clothes. Their eyes spewed bugs. Crazed with a million cracks, mud-splattered, twined with leaves, they grinned with filth-clotted mouths, reached out for a hug, beseeched, pondered, smiled serenely. Most of them were babies.

  An obscene pink knob poked out of a headless torso. A girl with mud-bedraggled hair and the left leg of another leaned down in greeting, her face a moving black mask of bugs. An old lamp lay in a thicket, a head with black-rimmed eyes poking out of it. A single strand of hair hung down to its chin, and its large blue eyes were innocent and interested. It seemed about to speak. A fat white leg hung on a line. In the root of a tree, a tangle of limbs clung to each other. A clown wore a bonnet. Naked Barbies with hair gone wild had colonized a thin tree, one of them sensibly wearing her sunglasses.

  It was a sky burial in slow motion.

  · 1854 ·

  The train shook, her brain shook. She flew into the future, dreaming she was lost in a big white house that went on forever, the windows dusty like the windows of the diligence taking her on the first stretch of her journey, from Culiacán to Los Mochis, to get over the mountains and out of Mexico. She saw glimpses of far mountains and miles of scrub, and occasionally a poor peon tramping in rags. Then she was back in her bunk, listening to the sound that had woken her up: a baby crying, far along the train toward New Orleans, a lost thin bleating like a lamb.

  Needing privacy, she’d paid a few extra dollars to get a berth for the night. The sleeper was dark and cramped, the passage very narrow, people walking up and down it constantly, brushing against the thick hessian curtain she’d pulled across in front of her bed. A man in the bunk across the passage snored and snorted and tossed, so close it was indecent, and the clanking and screeching, the jolt
ing and swaying, the dusty coal smell kept her awake. At least she had sheets and they were clean. She huddled down into them with old Yatzi, thinking about the great city, every great promised city, New York, Chicago, Boston, and the people she’d meet tomorrow in New Orleans. Yatzi’s bald wooden head was tucked under her chin.

  The whistle was a soul in distress. God, but this land was flat and endless. Miles and miles of spreading green, some trees, occasionally a crossroads. The flatness had become a dream verging on nightmare. No one lived here. That there were flat places in the world she’d known, but the enormity of it scared her even more than crossing the mountains. She’d been afraid all the way from Culiacán. The first couple of days she kept thinking she’d get off at the next stop and go back home. She thought she’d be discovered. They’d be attacked by bandits, robbed. Killed. Two more weeks, slogging higher and higher into her mother’s mountains in a smelly wagon she couldn’t even get out of to stretch her legs, not till everyone else was asleep, and then only for a brief interlude of wide cool darkness, a quick look up at the frosty stars. The driver and all the passengers thought she was a young girl traveling alone to meet her guardian, veiled because of a vow she’d made to Our Lady. Respecting her silence, they left her alone and were kind and helpful whenever they made a stop. Up the mountains, down the mountains, going mad with boredom, sleeping and drifting, jerking awake a hundred times, and with every mile that jolted by feeling more and more unreal, losing all sense of distance, the world a giant carpet unfolding endlessly.

  In the morning they pulled into a depot. She was up and dressed and veiled, sitting by one of the small windows. The porter came with bread and coffee. New Orleans was no more than a couple of hours away, he said. The coffee was appalling. She was sick to death of this veil. She’d never had to wear it so much at home. It didn’t matter. All these new people she’d have to meet, she’d be famous, Rates said. She would perform. They’d flock in their millions. And they’d pay. After New Orleans, New York. Let them goggle. You show them, you show them what you can do, how proud you are, you go out there and let them see you. Can’t do it, she thought. Scared. Scared. Have to. Come this far. Who is this Rates anyway? Mamá, I’m lost. She sipped the bitter muck. He could be a crook or a madman for all she knew. All she remembered was a suave pudgy little man, well spoken. In New Orleans, Mr. Rates said, there’d be a big rehearsal room where she could practice on a real stage. What if he wasn’t there? Alone in New Orleans. Never get back home.

  The conductor was calling all aboard. The place filled up. She watched the country roll by again, flat as ever still, but broken up now with vast stretches of water and acres of sugarcane, and people sprinkled out like black corn, working the flatness. The long car was packed, boys passed up and down the aisle selling candy and papers, and the heat was terrible. Off in the distance from time to time a cluster of slave cabins would appear, and sometimes a great white house. The windows didn’t open. The air was ripe with sweaty people. A stove at one end leaked smoke.

  At the station she stood with her grip on the ground beside her. The place swarmed, the same as all the other way stations they’d stopped at along the road, only bigger and noisier. She didn’t see Mr. Rates and didn’t know what to do, where to wait. Everyone was shouting, shunting luggage around. She tried to get out of the way, close to tears. And then he loomed in front of her, the portly man from the night of Marta’s wedding, with his thin-lipped smile and small pale eyes. At the wedding he’d been dressed like a gentleman, but here he wore a loud checked jacket and carried a black cane with a silver tip.

  “My dear Miss Julia,” he said in an oily way.

  “Mr. Rates,” she said, “I was just wondering what to do if you hadn’t been here.”

  “Of course I’m here.”

  A thin pockmarked boy whose nose turned up extremely appeared at Mr. Rates’s side. He looked straight at her veiled face, then away.

  “And on time, you see,” Rates said. “Is this all you have?”

  She looked down. Her stuff looked paltry. “This is all,” she said.

  “Excellent. Michael!”

  The boy picked up her grip and her guitar and set off briskly, weaving through the crowd. Mr. Rates offered Julia his arm and led her after him. “You must be tired,” he said. “Terrible journey, terrible, I’ve done it myself. All went well, I take it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Excellent.”

  Outside, the horses hung down their long brown heads, nostrils steaming. Their carriage smelled of dung and lemons. All the books she’d read in Don Pedro’s house had not prepared her for the excitement of New Orleans. “But it’s too big!” she said with a nervous laugh. “It goes on and on.” It was a city of long streets and tall terraces, big houses with gardens, Spanish courtyards that put her in mind of Culiacán, and everywhere people teeming, loitering, meeting and parting, more people than she’d ever seen. Music flashed by, the high whistling peal of a street organ. Trying to see, she carefully lifted her veil, and was aware of a tightening in Rates’s attention. But she held it slantwise, cleverly, so that it was like looking out of a tunnel. No one could see her.

  “Careful,” Rates said very softly by her ear.

  She had never felt so buried yet so alive, and she dropped the veil.

  “I’m scared about meeting all the new people,” she said too quickly.

  Rates leaned back. “Of course,” he said, “it’s only natural. But there’s nothing to be afraid of.” He smiled and, putting on his grand stage voice declaimed, “You were born to entertain!”

  “I’m sick, sick of this veil!”

  “Not long now,” he said, “you can take it off soon,” patting her gloved hand and leaning close so that she could smell a slight odor from his breath. “You’re not shy, Julia,” he said. “It’s what I noticed first about you. How calmly you faced the world with that stupendous, utterly unnatural face of yours, and of course—you know the spirit in which I say that, it’s merely a stated fact—I knew then you were a natural. No, no, there’s no doubt in my mind, no doubt at all, but that you’ll thrive.”

  The carriage swerved to get by a crowd spilling into the road.

  “Tell her about the St. Charles Theatre, Mikey,” he said.

  “It’s grand,” Michael said, bored, looking out of the window on the other side, where a horse pulling a big dray was blocked by a lopsided cart. The man driving the dray started shouting in an accent she couldn’t make out.

  “Wait until you see New York,” said Rates.

  “I can’t believe I will.”

  “Oh, you will,” he said, “you will.”

  “Wish I could go to New York,” said Michael grumpily.

  “It’s not as pretty as New Orleans,” said Rates, and the boy gave a crude snort as if prettiness was overrated. “It’s like an old whore,” he said, “all paint and dirty underneath.”

  Mr. Rates’s sister-in-law ran a rooming place in one of the faubourgs, an area where shuttered cottages mingled with low terraces and overhanging roofs. On shady wrought-iron balconies, on steps, porches, people, people everywhere, all kinds, Spanish, black, white, every mixture. They pulled up beside a high fence in a busy street, not far from a corner where women hovered seriously over baskets of fruit outside an oddly shaped store. A tall middle-aged woman in a dark blue dress opened the gate immediately as if she’d been watching for them, and peered into the carriage eagerly before they’d even had a chance to get out. “Well, the new girl,” she said and giggled like a giddy girl. Her face, vivacious and fleshily wrinkled, was heavily powdered white and wafted a scent of flowers into the airless carriage. “Can’t wait to see what you got under there,” she said cheerfully.

  “Julia, this is Madame Soulie,” Rates said, “my sister-in-law.”

  “Terrible journey, I dare say.” Madame Soulie stood down so the driver could open the carriage door. Rates descended heavily, turned and gave his hand to Julia. “It was such a long journey,” sh
e said breathlessly, stepping down.

  “Hellish, I’m sure.” Madame Soulie aimed a kick at a wiry gray dog rooting in the trash that bloomed along the bottom of the fence, snarling and unleashing a stream of furious French at it before snapping back startlingly into her practiced smile.

  “Please,” she said, “this way. What a tiny little thing you are!”

  They followed her through the yard to the house, while Michael came along behind with her luggage. Pink azaleas blazed along the sides of the path. On either side of the cottage a shingle roof hung down low, and a pomegranate tree shaded the walkway to the back. Somewhere inside a piano plink-plonked lazily.

  Madame Soulie jumped up the step with a girlish bob unsuited to her bulk and called, “Charlotte!” She held her hand out behind her to Julia, who took it and stepped into a wide yellow-walled room with a door on either side and a gallery above. She got an impression of faded, leaf-patterned divans. “Charlotte,” Madame Soulie called again. “Where are you? Oh, there you are.”

  A bony mulatto girl of about twelve appeared silently.

  “Charlotte, take Miss Julia across.” Madame Soulie wore five or six very long strings of beads that she fiddled with constantly. “Are you hungry, dear?”

  “Not at all,” said Julia, “only very thirsty.”

  “Rest a while,” Rates said genially, flinging himself down in an extravagantly exhausted way on one of the divans as if he himself had just come all that way. His belly was a dome of worn white linen. “The girl will bring you hot chocolate. Time enough to meet the others.”